The Strange and Wonderful Saga of a Fiberglass Model T Replica Getting Turned Into a Real Ford AMBR Contender.

Beyond the Beatnik

The quest to make it real—there’s an interesting unwritten rule about old Ford hot rods, and that’s as long as the car has a genuine Ford-produced body it’s still a Ford. Take for example the engine can come from a Chevy, the transmission a Corvette, and the rearend out of an Olds with a pair of American Stamping Deuce ‘rails for a frame, but as long as it has Henry-stamped tin covering it all, it’s a real Ford.

Now on the other hand a hot rod can run a Ford engine backed with a Ford transmission and Ford rearend, but if the body happens to be a fiberglass replica of a Ford, it’s a kit car.

The first time I saw the track T gracing this month’s cover was around 1992 at my Hamster friend Gene Koch’s house in Garden Grove, California. It was the week before the Love Ride, and all of Gene’s Hamster buddies were in town for the ride. For you who have never heard of the Hamsters, they’re a group of Harley-Davidson riders populated by the world’s most renown custom bike builders, or they’re guys who can afford to have a Harley custom built by one of the world’s most renowned bike builders.

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The Hamster piloting the track T was a fellow I’d heard Koch say was Urban Hirsch III. Koch told me about Urban’s Track T weeks before I’d ever seen the car. Most notable of the specifications I recalled was it had a fully polished, all-aluminum Paul Grichar Racing engine that was almost impossible to drive without burning the rear tires down to the sidewall lettering before driver control could be regained. The color of the car was a shade of red that reminded me of the red on a track bike-style FXR Hamster Arlen Ness had built for fellow Hamster Barry Weiss. All in all, the Track T had a lot of really nice high-end components comprising it, but there was no mistaking its wavy 1927 T replica body was of genuine kit car fiberglass through and through.

Some 20 years later I was at the Donut Derelicts’ weekly Saturday gathering in Huntington Beach, California, when a mountain of a man wearing a top hat and red coat rolled in jockeying the strangest automobile creation I’d ever seen sporting legal license plates. The thing looked like a horse-drawn buggy, only the horse was plucked from a carousel and hollowed out with a blown Chrysler Hemi engine bursting out of its back with big chrome zoomies out each side. When the driver pulled the reins the contraption pivoted in the middle, fulfilling the illusion that it was indeed a horse-drawn buggy.

In the crowd of amazed spectators I joined into a conversation with a cat wearing a purple Beatniks jacket and a ’50s-looking kid trying to recollect the name of a similarly inspired contraption George Barris had built for Paul Revere and the Raiders. The more I heard the Beatniks’ New York accent, the more I realized I had met him over the phone a decade before. It was at the suggestion of my customizer buddy in Utah, Bo Huff that I gave the fabricator he met in Florida a call. Bo said they called him Chopit and he was building a radical bubbletop known as the Beatnik from scratch, and his metal-forming skills were beyond belief.

Later that day I recalled the Barris creation made for Mark Lindsay and band was called the Raider Coach, and gave Chopit a call. Gary invited me to come visit his shop in Stanton and see what they were all about. Chopit Kustom is a block north of where Hot Rods by Boyd and Vale’s Kustom Kolors used to be on Monroe. Stepping inside the family run shop is a time warp with a 2-second flight to New York’s finest Deli where the menu is chopped Mercs and tasty hot rods seasoned with styling and engineering that’s totally unique to Gary Chopit.

I hadn’t seen the car for 20 years. On one of my weekly visits I walked into Chopit Kustom and found Urban Hirsch’s Track T was there to get a body change. For whatever reasons Urban told Gary to find him a real steel, genuine Henry-produced 1927 T roadster body and make it a driver. This wasn’t to be a total fresh build from the ground up, I’m guessing Urban just wanted to lose the Tupperware bucket and nose. The body Gary found was relatively rust free, but it had dents from one end to the other. As the days went by Gary and his oldest son Nicholas metal-finished the roadster body back into a pristine example of what a mint 1927 T-bucket platform and turtle deck should look like.

I’ve learned the first thing Chopit Kustom does when they start on a project is to restore the car back to exactly as how it appeared stock and then begin customizing from there. After the T’s topside looked totally cherry the body was flipped upside down and a steel floorpan designed and fabricated to add passenger legroom with structural rigidity. Gary’s youngest son Fabian fabricated gussets and then TIG-welded them into place. As artistic and precise, the hand-formed body panels seen in plain sight are an equal amount of attention and detail was paid to body parts that will never be seen again. Flipped back topside the doorjambs were gapped tighter and heavily reinforced, so when the doors are shut they quietly click like one would expect Rolls-Royce doors to fit and sound. Look at all of the gaps on the car, and you’ll notice a perfect ice cream stick fit.

At a mere 21 years old, Nicky Chopit took a shot at fabricating his first aluminum track nose. Nick took a large sheet of aluminum and went from what looked like a crumpled foil gum wrapper into what he drew over a wood buck and transformed into a flawlessly shaped nose. When the time came for paint the nose received primer, but no body filler was needed. Nick used the nose buck to make a jig to form the grille surround from solid brass, and fill it with grille bars fabricated out of stainless steel. For the windshield Nick started with a Speedway DuVall windshield frame and true to name, chopped it down. The finishing touch was a trip to Nashville for some of that Speedway Motors recommended good ol’ Tennessee chrome plating.

The only demands Urban made regarding the car’s completion date was it had to be ready to drive to Paso Maria, and the Father’s Day show. Too monumental a task to complete the car in a year’s short time this meant Gary, Nick, Fabian, including Gary’s only daughter Tiffany would jump on getting the car ready to go, and then tear it completely apart after it returned. In all, the Track T was completely disassembled and rebuilt three times. On the final go around Gary, Nick, and Fabian prepped the car for paint and then Gary used his new paint booth for the first time to shoot the car in a House of Kolor custom-mixed candy pearlescent hue, named Hamster Gold.

The only original part left on Urban’s Track T since it first debuted as a black scalloped kit car in the early ’90s is its 106-inch wheelbase 2×3-inch box 3/16-inch wall frame built by Magoo. To make room for large capacity Tanks Inc. 18-gallon stainless steel gas tank Chopit Kustom modified the frame step and went with a Currie 9-inch packing 4.11 gears with Posi. As with all of the chrome plating on the car the Currie rearend was put into a special wood crate and shipped to Advanced Plating in Nashville. The front suspension is a fully chromed Super Bell axle hung with Ford round spindles and JHRS Kinmont Safety Stop Buick drum-looking disc brakes. All four brakes depend on a Corvette master cylinder assisted with a 7-inch booster. The front wheels are 16×5 SO-CAL Knockoffs mounted on 5.00-16 Coker Firestones. In the rear 16×8 SO-CAL Knockoffs are shod with 8.90-16 Coker Firestones. Nick’s girlfriend, Kiera Brady, hand lettered the Coker Firestones the day before the T made its debut as an AMBR contender.

Nick fabricated the T’s firewall from 1/8-inch-thick plate steel. This allowed not one mounting hole to penetrate the front side of the firewall plus made an extremely solid mount for a Tri-C Engineering Steer Clear to solve uncramping the area around the toeboard. Once there was more legroom Chopit Kustom fabricated custom pedals to take full advantage.

Under the custom aluminum hood and sides Nicky fabricated, he designed a hidden hood release to reveal the Paul Grichar Racing small-block Chevy engine based around a genuine Chevrolet Performance block and heads. A COMP cam and 11:1 TRW pistons add to the performance mix. Moon valve covers perpetuate the right look. To fit the new hood and nose’s much lower profile a PerTronix distributor and low-rise, dual-quad Offenhauser intake manifold with Edelbrock AFBs were installed. As with all of the aluminum and stainless steel on the T the Offy intake was polished by M&G Custom Polishing, located across the street from Chopit Kustom in Stanton, California. It’s interesting to note M&G was Boyd’s polisher of choice. The fully polished and custom bent stainless steel exhaust system features a pair of polished stainless steel Porter mufflers with Chopit dumps on each side.

The leather upholstery by Fat Lucky of Glendale, California, is one of the few things not done in-house by the Chopit clan. The Chopits formed a finishing piece to go in place where a tack strip normally encircles a T-bucket, and then Fat Lucky leather covered a pair of Speedway bomber aluminum bucket seats along with the trunk and interior panels. On the transmission tunnel Fat Lucky carpeted there’s a Genie shifter fitted with a Chopit formed stainless steel shifter that connects to 700-R4 built by Harrell’s Transmission of Covina, California. The steering wheel on a custom tilt column was custom made by Chopit Kustom and then leather wrapped. The dashboard is a modified 1926 Model T packed with Stewart-Warner gauges.

A lot has happened since Gary Chopit built the Beatnik bubbletop in Florida and then moved his family business to California in 2011. It was 2012 when Urban Hirsch dropped his Track T off at Chopit Kustom, and it’s quite likely Urban had no idea the minor modifications he asked Gary to perform would balloon into a show car worthy of a 2015 AMBR contender, no less on the cover of STREET RODDER. And astounding as it may seem those two milestones haven’t prevented Urban from realizing his original intention to drive the track T as a roadworthy street rod.